The Overman Culture

The Overman Culture by Edmund Cooper
Berkley Medallion, 1972
Price I paid: 25¢

“A REAL SPINNER!…Michael is a ‘fragile’ boy—one of a seemingly small number of children who grow tired when they run, who bleed when they are hurt, who can’t take off their heads….As the fragile children discover each other, probe in the moldering ruins of London, and try to interpret what they find, they come to the conclusion that they have been created by some super-scientist, as guinea pigs for an experiment.
“And what happens if the guinea pigs turn on their creator—on the Overman of the legend they all know? They may be destroyed. They may be set free. They may escape. And who or what are the others, the ‘drybones’ who do not bleed, who can take off their heads? Edmund Cooper has secrets he can hide as well from you as from the fragiles…”
—P. Schuyler Miller, Analog

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The Floating Zombie

The Floating Zombie by D.F. Jones
Berkley Medallion, 1975
Price I paid: $1.25

Before AT1 had ground down the slipway unchristened―rightly, said seamen, for it would be a ship with no soul―it had been dubbed “Zombie.” That sinister name would stick, and prove its accuracy. AT1 was a robot-ship, a ship with no crew, only a tiny security force of 3 men and a woman. “Invulnerable,” said its inventors, and “foolproof.”

But it was neither―not if one of the 4 security guards was an insane, ruthless killer. And if the greatest and most powerful self-contained nuclear reactor in the world fell into the hands of such a person, the whole world was in peril!

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The Rose

The Rose by Charles L. Harness
Berkley Medallion Books, 1969
(Originally published in Authentic SF, 1953)
Price I paid: none

The year 1953 is a hallowed one to such connoisseurs of science fiction as Arthur C. Clarke, Michael Moorcock, Brian W. Aldiss, Judith Merril and Damon Knight. It was in that year that a novel called THE ROSE appeared in the British magazine, Authentic SF. It was only the second novel by the American Charles Harness, but he was already a highly regarded writer by those in the know. It was also, unfortunately, his last, until his recent resumption of writing and the publication of a long-awaited new novel, THE RING OF RITORNEL. (Available as a Berkley paperback, X1630)

THE ROSE depicts an ultimate confrontation between science and art, brilliantly and wittily played out between three unforgettable leading characters:

Anna van Tuyl—a composer and also a practicing psychiatrist
Ruy Jacques—Anna’s lover
Martha—Ruy’s wife, who is perfecting a deadly weapon that will render science supreme over art

Here, at last, is a U.S. edition of this superb SF novel, an exciting event for all admirers of little-known science fiction gems.

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Magellan

Magellan by Colin Anderson
Berkley Science Fiction, 1970
Price I paid: 75¢

Magellan is the last city-state on earth—a society where perfection is being rapidly approached. It is the Eve of Eternity—the day when the great computer complex Chronophage will assume dominion over the earth and grant every man his wish.

Euripides Che Fourthojuly 1070121, who has been avoiding the tranquilizing drugs all are required to take, will be in for a very bad time indeed….

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The Quy Effect

The Quy Effect by Arthur Sellings
Berkley Medallion, 1968
Price I paid: 90¢

The Quy Effect

It was so powerful that in one instant it obliterated an entire building. Only the concrete floor and stumps of walls, like the evacuated ruins of some ancient city, gave any indication that there had been a building there at all.

The Quy Effect

Its implications were so revolutionary as to render all past scientific concepts obsolete…which only served to alienate the entire scientific community against its inventor, Adolphe Quy….

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The Reefs of Earth

The Reefs of Earth by R.A. Lafferty
Berkley Medallion Books, 1968
Price I paid: 90¢

A PLAGUE OF DEMONS

—that’s what the people of Lost Haven called the six children (seven, if you counted Bad John) of the Dulanty Family. They looked like normal Earth children…except when they flicked their ears like animals, or made their eyes glow with a green fire…and if you looked at them sideways they did look strangely like nightmarish gargoyles.

The truth is: these children are Pucas, aliens from a strange planet. And they have taken it upon themselves to reduce the world to a population of six (seven, if you count Bad John). Wishing will make it so, for by making up an appropriate death rhyme, they can destroy their victims.

These frightening, far-out kids take a black delight in destroying their neighbors, and the Earth people are defenseless against them….

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Denver is Missing

Denver is Missing by D.F. Jones
Berkley Medallion Books, 1971
Price I paid: 90¢

A scientist reports to a stunned world: “The whole earth may be shrivelling up like a punctured balloon.” The flight from cities at high altitudes—whose nitrogen gas accidentally released from the earth’s core is gathering to cause mass death—to the coastlines creates political chaos and violent anarchy. But worse is in store for mankind—for the coastline holds only temporary haven.

The great oceans of the world are about to deliver destruction on a scale never before envisioned even in nightmares of nuclear holocaust. Two men and two women in a flimsy yacht in the Pacific may hold the key to the earth’s survival…

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Solo Kill

Solo Kill by S. Kye Boult
Berkley Medallion Books, 1977
Price I paid: 75¢

High above the heavy air, the March People and the winged Drak met where the two suns crossed: locked in a battle as old as the ritual of life itself. For Amarson and his fierce lady Ameera, to live was to kill Drak; to die was nothing. That was the Law—until the long-winged Flier came, riding the crest of the thermocline….

In this masterful science fantasy adventure, S. Kye Boult has created a world that is both grippingly intense and luminously strange.

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Galactic Sibyl Sue Blue

Galactic Sibyl Sue Blue by Rosel George Brown
Berkley Medallion Books, 1966
Price I paid: 90¢

THE FUZZ: VINTAGE 1990

When Sibyl Sue Blue, unique police sergeant of the future, smokes a benzale cigarette, she has a strange dream about the disappearance of her husband on the mysterious planet of Radix.

So she pulls of [sic] her wig and rouges her knees, and goes off to Radix with sinister millionaire Stuart Grant, and crew, in his space ship.

She finds her husband there, horribly transformed, and is in great danger of the same fate herself, unless she can get back to Earth in time. But this presents difficulties, because only Sibyl and the loathsome Dr. Beadle are in any shape to fly the ship, and neither one of them has ever done it before….

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Psi Hunt

Psi Hunt by Michael Kurland
Berkley Science Fiction, 1980
Price I paid: 90¢

Astral Emprise sold metaphysics, mysticism, paranormal phenomena, astrology lessons—and anything else that Believers were willing to spend a dollar on.

Not the kind of operation the U.S. Navy was used to dealing with.

Until the People’s Republic of China decided it could blow up half the United States with five telepathic kids who spent their days watching grade-B war movies in an L.A. theater.

And Lieutenant Junior Grade Robert Burrows was assigned to call their bluff…

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